Dying for a Nobel? Winners snag prizes at older ages

Apr. 9, 2014
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Sir Frederick Banting in 1936. / AP

by Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY

by Traci Watson, Special for USA TODAY

The Nobel Prize is supposed to be the ultimate mark of scientific achievement. Now it has become a mark of something else: endurance.

New research shows that the time lag between a notable scientific discovery and the Nobel Prize for that discovery has escalated sharply over the past century. Before 1940, roughly 10% to 15% of physics or chemistry laureates had endured a wait of more than 20 years between their discovery and the prize. But since 1985, 50% to 60% of laureates have waited that long. The lag time has also risen, though not as steeply, for winners of the Nobel for physiology or medicine.

If the trend continues, the gap between discovery and award will become so long that by the end of the century, many worthy scientists will die before they make the trip to Stockholm to receive their Nobels, says study co-author Santo Fortunato of Aalto University in Finland. The Nobel is not awarded posthumously.

"Delay is increasing for all disciplines," Fortunato says. "But I assume that trend will have to change, because otherwise there will be ... this progressive extinction of laureates before they get the award."

One such extinction has already taken place. In 2013, two theoretical physicists - one 84, one 81 - won the prize for papers published in the 1960s that paved the way for the discovery of the subatomic particle called the Higgs boson. But Robert Brout, who co-authored one of those papers, did not appear on the Nobel stage with his colleagues. He died in 2011 at age 82.

A century ago, Nobel prizes could occasionally be won in less time than it takes today's scientists to earn a Ph.D. The 32-year-old Frederick Banting, for example, was awarded the Nobel for physiology or medicine in 1923, a few years after embarking on the experiments that led to the isolation of insulin. The average wait time in the 1920s for any of the scientific Nobels was about a decade.

Now the time between discovery and being handed a medal by the king of Sweden averages almost 30 years for physics laureates and 20 to 25 years for winners in chemistry and physiology or medicine, and not even Fortunato and his colleagues, who published their findings as a letter to the editor in the journal Nature, can say exactly why. Perhaps the pace of significant new findings has slowed, Fortunato says.

"If you're rewarding discoveries ‚?¶ further in the past, that perhaps means there haven't been big things lately," he says. "You're perhaps forced to recognize (discoveries) that at the time you really didn't think were worth being recognized." He says it's also possible that the opposite is true: The number of landmark discoveries is rising, forcing the Nobel committees to dip into the past to reward deserving work passed over in earlier years.

The new study's results seem reasonable, says Matthew Wallace, a historian of science at the Institute of Innovation and Knowledge Management in Spain, who was not involved with the new research. But he thinks the long lag times may be due to the changing nature of the scientific enterprise, which over the past century has become fragmented and multi-disciplinary.

"It does take time for the dust to settle, for there to be unanimous agreement on a particular discovery," Wallace says. The trend toward longer waits "just reflects how hard it is to pick a winner."

The new results "could perhaps have been anticipated," Gustav K√§llstrand, senior curator of The Nobel Museum, says via e-mail, because of the growing number of nominees for the prize and the rise in life expectancy. While it's true that scientists who deserve the prize may not receive it, he adds, "given that the prize is only awarded to no more than three persons in each science category each year, that is already the case."

It's unclear whether the dragged-out process has a negative impact. Perhaps scientists become discouraged after decades of waiting for a Nobel, says economist Bruce Weinberg of Ohio State University. On the other hand, research on math scholars found they became less productive after winning the top mathematics prize, he says.

"It may be the case that ‚?¶ if you string them along longer, they actually work harder and are more productive," he says. "You're keeping them hungry for longer."

That assumes, of course, that those waiting for a Nobel keep working. By the time Richard Heck received the chemistry Nobel in 2010 for work he'd done about 40 years earlier, he was 79 and had retired to the Philippines to relax and grow orchids.